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One of Britain’s most influential entrepreneurs will be speaking about the impact the internet is having on small businesses, from the opportunity to close the UK’s productivity gap to the issue of loneliness, at an upcoming Breakfast event hosted by Opportunity Peterborough.

Penny Power OBE has been a leader in business since 1998 when she set up the UK’s first social network for businesses, Ecademy.

Since then she’s most notably gone on to write the manifesto for Digital Business Britain and set up a Digital Youth Academy in 2012.

Her latest venture brings her to Peterborough to launch The Business Café which aims to help local small companies share ideas, network and get additional free support for digital projects from the programme’s backers, such as 9Spokes, Vonage, O2, Yell, Sage, Xero, FreeAgent and ReceiptBank. The Business Cafe intends to bridge the gap between Starbucks and Facebook as the destination for small business and work with all business networks to support small businesses and grow the local economy

Within her talk, Penny will discuss the four pillars of business that she believes small businesses and their owners, should be mindful of to ensure their companies thrive.

“As we’ve seen in the government’s Industrial Strategy and in recent reports, Britain’s productivity has declined in recent years,” says Penny Power OBE. “This has coincided with a steep rise in entrepreneurship across the country. As productivity measures the value of goods divided by hours of labour, a surge of entrepreneurship will skew performance figures as small companies don’t have the same large, high volume outputs as global conglomerates. This means we should be doing all we can to support these businesses and founders to grow and be successful so I’m delighted to be sharing my tips with Peterborough’s ambitious companies.”

Steve Bowyer, chief executive of Opportunity Peterborough said, “We’re extremely pleased to have Penny sharing her expertise with our Bondholder members and to know that Peterborough will be the launch site of her exciting new project, The Business Cafe.

“Peterborough is still performing well economically and attracting a very healthy level of inward investment but productivity could still be higher so it’s important that we support the city’s burgeoning enterprises.”

The Breakfast is free of charge for members of the Opportunity Peterborough Network to attend. Delegates will receive a discount to use with their friends and family at the festive rink at Van Hage Garden Centre which can also be hired for corporate and informal events.

For more information about the event and the Bondholder Network, please click here.